Useful, Human and Touching: 3 Things You Need To Be To Improve Your Twitter Account

Dale Denham wrote a great post for Promo Marketing last week, "Promotional Products Suppliers Stink at Twitter," that I wanted to follow up on. If you haven't read it yet, go do that now (and be sure to read the infographic as well). All good? On to the follow-up then!

I absolutely agree with Dale, though I'd cast the net of Twitter stinkiness a bit wider. With rare exception, all of us could probably stand to improve our Twitter skills in one way or another. So with that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to build off some of Dale's ideas and show some examples of excellent Twitter feeds and talk about what we can learn from them. I thought Dale explained some of the most critical problems and solutions really well in his post, but for all the people who learn best by looking at examples (like myself), I thought looking at some of the best accounts out there might be another way to work at getting better.

1. STARBUCKS (Be Useful)
Starbucks is one of better product-centric accounts I've seen. For a corporate account, it's surprisingly unintrusive (only a few tweets a day, all written in a friendly, lightly mellow voice) and makes great use of photography (an easy way to make your tweets far more engaging). But, more important than anything else, the Starbucks feed follows the golden rule of Twitter: giving followers what they want.

The feed is PACKED with coupon, discount and service offers, as well as other valuable information for brand fanatics (when certain seasonal coffee flavors will be available, etc.). The Starbucks feed is great because it provides something useful to its followers. It's not a billboard or a radio-ad stuck on loop, it's a tool that helps fans get more of the product they like. That's what makes people follow and share it, by creating value rather than a new way for people to get commercial advertisements.